Within weeks of a mid-air explosion aboard an Air India flight in 1985 that killed 329 people, the RCMP pinpointed a number of suspects in Canada’s Sikh community. They believed a circle of naturalized Canadians planned, financed and carried out the horrific plot.
The RCMP were provided with unlimited resources to substantiate their suspicions. But they never found much to back up what they believed to be true. Their best evidence was thrown out of court. Their best informants were dismissed as not credible. The deadliest terrorist attack in Canadian history morphed into the country’s bloodiest unsolved crime. Twenty-one years later, we still do not know—and probably will never know—who built the explosive, who took the bomb to the Vancouver airport, who bought the tickets to put the bomb on a plane or who checked in the deadly baggage.
Journalists Salim Jiwa and Don Hauka, in Margin of Terror: A Reporter’s Twenty-Year Odyssey Covering the Tragedies of...
Robert Matas is a journalist, formerly of The Globe and Mail, based in Vancouver. He has written extensively about the missing women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the Robert Pickton trial and British Columbia’s Missing Women Commission of Inquiry.
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